A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Economics) of the University of Dar es Salaam

Fuel Taxes and the Poor challenges the conventional wisdom that gasoline taxation, an important and much-debated instrument of climate policy, has a disproportionately detrimental effect on poor people.

Fuel Taxes and the Poor, The Distributional Effects of Gasoline Taxation and Their Implications for Climate Policy. Edited By Thomas Sterner. Published by RFF Press with Environment for Development initiative.

In this paper we use laboratory experiments to test the theoretical predictions derived by Villegas-Palacio and Coria (2010) about the effects of the interaction between technology adoption and incomplete enforcement. They show that under Tradable Emissions Permits (TEPs), and in contrast to taxes, the fall in permit price produced by adoption of environmentally friendly technologies reduces the benefits of violating the environmental regulation at the margin and leads firms to improve their compliance behavior.

Addressing environmental challenges. including climate change has been rationalized in China as both necessary for solving domestic problems and capable of gaining new business opportunities and competitive advantages.

Using a choice experiment, we investigated preferences for distributing the economic burden of decreasing CO2 emissions in the two largest CO2-emitting countries: the United States and China. We asked respondents about their preferences for four burden-sharing rules to reduce CO2 emissions according to their country’’s 1) historical emissions, 2) income level, 3) equal right to emit per person, and 4) current emissions.

The risk of losses of income and productive means due to adverse weather can differ significantly among farmers sharing a productive landscape, and is of course hard to estimate, or even “guesstimate” empirically. Moreover, the costs associated with investments in reduced vulnerability to climatic events are likely to exhibit economies of scope. We explore the implications of these characteristics on farmer's decisions to adapt to climate change using a framed field experiment applied to coffee farmers in Costa Rica.

Within a South African context, a green certificate system would provide a mechanism with which to verify compliance with any future renewable energy obligations, and would encourage renewable electricity generation in the current monopoly environment.

This study investigates the impact of climate change adaptation on farm households’ downside risk exposure (e.g., risk of crop failure) in the Nile Basin of Ethiopia. The analysis relies on a moment-based specification of the stochastic production function.

This paper investigates whether South African households and small businesses can take advantage of the country's substantial wind resources to produce their own power from small- scale wind turbines in a viable way.